


Cassandra

by Seiya234



Series: Transcendence AU [12]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-15 08:39:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4600176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seiya234/pseuds/Seiya234
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, Stan's mom didn't always lie to her clients, the triplets take after their great-great grandmother in more ways than one, and Stan takes multiple trips down memory lane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The door cracked open, and a shaft of light entered the room. Ford had fallen asleep long ago, some weird nerd book about little green men still clutched in one of his hands. Stan had of course, just started to sleep before he was awoken by their Ma coming in the room.

Stan sat up, blinking at the light from the hall.

“Ma? Have you been drinking again?” She probably had been, he thought. The bit of hair she usually kept in a bun was out and was flying loose in a cloud around her hair. He could smell gin on her breath even from the bunk bed. In the light and shadow her face looked….creepy. Like a skull. Even though it was just his Ma and Stan Pines wasn’t scared of nothing, still he felt goosebumps break out on his arms and legs. Stan pulled the blanket up a little more to his chest.

“Ma? Are you okay?”

She took one halting step towards the bed, and then another. She stopped, shuddering like maybe she was about to puke on the floor or maybe it was that walking was too hard, Stan had no idea. Finally she pointed a shaking finger at him.

“Don’t abandon them,” she rasped in the voice she only pulled out for the customers that paid extra for their fortunes. Like, _extra_  extra.

“Ummmm…who?”

Quick as a flash she was next to him, leaning in to his face. Her eyes were wild and Stan was pretty sure he could light her breath on fire.

“Don’t. Abandon. Them. The lost one and his star. The world depends on it. Depends on you.”

“Ooookay Ma,” Stan agreed, gently edging away from his mother. He needed to get Dad. Dad was pretty good about getting Ma into bed when she was in these moods.

“Do-”

Then Ma collapsed forward on his bed, and began to snore.

Stan sighed and crawled out from around his Ma. He reminded himself to pour out her bottle of gin into the sink in the morning.

—-

Stan jumped awake, and quickly looked around to make sure that no one saw him doing something so….so  _old_  like sleeping on the couch in the middle of the day.

 

Especially when Mabel and Henry were trusting him to watch the babies and _oh fuck._  His head whipped to the playpen where he had put the triplets after he had fed them lunch. They not only were still there, giggling and rolling around on the floor, but they had been joined by-

Stan snorted. He wasn’t sure what he had been worried about-not when their other uncle could probably sense if Hank stubbed his toe or Acacia sneezed from half a world away.

Willow had toddled over and was gumming on one of Dipper’s wings, leaving a massive drool trail as she moved her mouth. His nephew had taken his shoes off and was wiggling his clawed toes, much to Hank’s amusement. Acacia was climbing on and off his lap, babbling to her uncle nonstop. A finger, claw blunted, stroked her hair whenever she got close enough for Dipper to do so.

Dipper looked over at Stan and grinned, showing both rows of teeth. He looked completely goofy despite the two rows of fangs he was showing off, surrounded by his niblings as Dipper was. Stan couldn’t help but smile a little bit back, despite his better instincts. He would never, ever actually utter these words but this all was kind of, sort of…..cute.

Acacia squawked and fell into Dipper’s lap. Hank grew tired of looking at his uncle’s weird toes and toddled over to join his older sister, flopping on Dipper’s lap as well. Willow continued to drool on Dipper, as she moved over to start chewing on his other wing.

“My stars,” Dipper uttered under his breath, and Stan thought his nephew must have forgotten that he was in the room. “Mine to guide me home, mine to hold, _m̴̧in͞è̸͡_.”

Something in Stan’s creaky memory lurched, waved a creaky hand to get his attention. A night far too long ago, when he was still a brother and a son, and above all, could still fit on a bunk bed and-

Stan sucked in a breath.

She was right again.

—-

Stan’s Ma was a pathological liar, which served her well as a phone psychic. Even when her customers keyed into the fact that she was feeding them a complete line of bullshit, she was so entertaining that they kept calling back.

What no one-not his brother, not him, and certainly not his Dad-ever talked about was that sometimes….Ma was right.

There had been the time that she had looked at Mrs. Filalie, who ran Hot Belgian Waffles next door, and said “May wanna buy some life insurance on your old man; he’s gonna croak next month.” Their neighbor hadn’t taken kindly to that, or to the basket of fruit Ma had made Ford run over for Mr. Filalie’s wake that next month.

Or when she barged in on them playing Cowboys and Indians, looked at Ford, and muttered “You really shouldn’t sulk; you’ll get what you want anyway.” That one hadn’t made sense until far, far too late.

Sometimes it was little stuff and sometimes it was big things. Sometimes it was about something that would happen the next day, the next week. Other predictions were about events that were twenty, fifty, even (to Stan’s great surprise) ninety years in the future.

The problem was telling truth from bullshit. His mom used the same deep spooky voice on the phone with the rubes, when she was fucking around with them (which was quite often) and when she leaned into the kitchen and said “A house will come crashing down and your world will become rearranged” the day before his twelfth birthday. Other times prophecy came in a normal setting, in her normal Jersey accent, as if it was passing through her head.

Honestly. What else was he supposed to think when his mom handed him the casserole and nonchalantly said, “Be good to that kid even when he gets yellow eyes.” That he’d be running into someone with jaundice at Glass Shard High School?

Stan and Ford had always believed their mother, or at least when they could sort out lie from truth from drunk rambling from fucking around with them.

Their dad never did.  
\-------  
  
Stan waved at Jimmy and then turned the grocery cart into the next aisle. He could hear Acacia ahead of him, and the awed murmurs of a few other brats her age, and sighed.  
  
Time to see what trouble that girl had gotten into now.  
  
His oldest granddau-niece was standing by an open barrel of pinto beans. Reverently, the light glinting off of her new glasses, she placed one bean in her hand. The five or six other kids around her, all younger than Acacia's eight years, looked on in awe.  
  
" _This_ ," she breathed reverently, "is a crocodile egg."  
  
Jaws dropped.  
  
"I know what you're thinking-why is it so small? That's because baby alligators are like those little sponge things-you know, those dinosaurs you put water on and they get big?"  
  
Heads nodded, and Acacia went on. "Once these puppies hit the water-BAM!" Acacia clapped her hands for emphasis and two or three of the kids by the barrel jumped. "Big old alligator! That's why alligators live in swamps and stuff-they need water to hatch their eggs."  
  
The only boy that was Acacia's age snorted.  
  
"You're a big liar. Those are just pinto beans. Besides, why would the grocery store sell alligator eggs? That's stupid."  
  
Acacia's eyes narrowed at the challenge she had been presented with.  
  
"They sell chicken eggs here-why not gator eggs?"  
  
"Because you can eat chicken eggs dumbo."  
  
Acacia took a step closer to her sandy haired challenger, a reminder that she stood a head over him.  
  
"Who says you can't eat these eggs either?"  
  
"Um-"  
  
"Exactly!" She turned back to the small crowd she had amassed and grinned. "Don't believe me? I dare you all to slip one of these eggs in your pocket and take it home with you! Put it in the tub and-"  
  
Stan knew that the grocery store wouldn't miss seven beans out of an entire barrel full but he had to be a "good example" or some shit like that so he broke in.  
  
"Alright, alright. Show's over kids. Get outta here."  
  
The group of kids scattered, and Acacia stomped her foot and flared up at Stan.  
  
"Grunkle Stan! You ruined my story!"  
  
He leaned on the handle of his cart. "Kid, how were you going to explain yourself at school when those beans didn't hatch?"  
  
Acacia rolled her eyes. "I was going to make a deal with Uncle Dipper, duuuuuh. He'd think it'd be funny like me so he'd do it."  
  
"What on earth were you going to offer him for something that big?"  
  
"My dessert for six months," she said matter of factly.  
  
Stan stared at his niece for a second, and finally barked out a laugh. "Sweetie that is an absolutely stupid and reckless idea. I like it!"  
  
Acacia laughed now as well, a big horsey snort that was the exact same laugh that his Ma had. Hell now that he was thinking about it, Acacia lied as good as Ma too. There was a pang in his chest for a second; he wished his Ma could have met her great-great grandchild, who reminded Stan so much of her.  
  
Stan steeled his face to a frown, and looked down at Acacia. "I'm still telling your parents what you were going to do though."  
  
"What?!"  
  
Stan shrugged. "Them's the breaks."  
  
"But, but-" Acacia jumped on to the front of the cart, as Stan went down the aisle to get the next thing on Henry's grocery list. "Can we make a deal?"  
  
"Tell you what-you got until we leave the store to come up with something good for me."  
  
\------  
  
"Ma?"  
  
Stan's mom looked up from the couch where she had been lying. The phone was on the coffee table next to her, the cord stretched as far as it could from the wall.  
  
"What is it kid? I got a customer calling in two minutes. Probably."  
  
"Why is the sky blue?"  
  
His Ma rolled her eyes. "Why don't you ask your brother?"  
  
"Ford says I already used up all my nerd questions today."  
  
Ma raised an eyebrow. "And I thought I heard him tell you to stop calling them nerd questions."  
  
Stan scuffed one of his shoes across the shag carpet. "Yeah," he muttered.  
  
His mom looked at Stan for a minute and then sighed, and sat up a bit, leaving a spot open on the couch for Stan to climb up on.  
  
"You see Stanley, the sky is blue because of airplanes."  
  
"Airplanes?"  
  
"Oh yeah! Every night before the sun comes out there's a big fleet of airplanes-" Ma shot out an arm to encompass the ceiling and by proxy the sky above. "-and they have big blue dye packets inside that they drop out of the cargo bay and _bam_! Blue sky!"  
  
Stan was absolutely mind blown. "What color would it be if they didn't do that?" he asked.  
  
She rolled her eyes. "Smorple. Duh goober."  
  
"Smorple isn't a color Ma!"  
  
His Ma raised an eyebrow. "How do you know? Have you ever seen the sky when its smorple?"  
  
"Uh, no?"  
  
"Exactly-" The phone rang and Ma straightened up a little more and reached out to the receiver. "Now get, I gotta take this."

 

\---------------

As an adult, even as fucked up as he was, Stan could look back on his childhood and realize that perhaps his Ma wasn’t the most….motherly or best Ma possible.

He and Ford made their own breakfast and lunches from the time they were tall enough to get a stool out to reach the cabinets. There were nights that neither of them could sleep, kept awake by the arguments, the screaming and sound of things being thrown as Ma and Dad fought in the living room. The times where they played rock paper scissors to see who would be the one to help Ma off the couch and into bed or to the toilet, depending on the sounds she was making and the level of the gin bottle next to her. All the little errands they did for their weird Uncle Tony (and it wasn’t until Stan started running with the wrong crowd that he realized what it was that Tony did.) And there was the way that Ma perpetually lied to them. She lied so often that they gave up trying to parse truth from fiction and just accepted that everything that came from her mouth was a lie. 

But Ma was still Ma. And maybe she had them make their own food, but when they were small the sandwich stuff and cereal boxes were always on the lower shelves of the pantry. There were surprise visits to Atlantic City, and the one magical time they made it all the way to New York. She tucked them in every night, no matter how much their Dad griped that she was just making them soft. She helped Stan with his homework when Ford got fed up, and tried her best to teach Ford how to talk to girls. There was that one teacher in third grade that thought Ford was cheating- Mrs. Liberatore- and Ma went to the school, and gave her the Evil Eye. Well, Mrs. Liberatore _thought_ Ma gave her the Evil Eye and that’s what counted.

And she was the only one, after Ford, who believed in him.

He knew his Ma loved them (even if Dad didn’t want them to say that, pushed Stan away when he was little and still tried to give his Pa hugs.) He knew Ma would never hurt them, would do anything for him and Ford.

But sometimes she scared the living shit out of him.

\---------

Stan thought things would be different for Willow.

Sure she had inherited….whatever was in his family that made weird shit happen to people. But this was a different world than the one his Ma lived in. Magic was commonplace now, and even the wackiest pro-nat nut jobs could not deny its existence. And besides, it wasn’t like his youngest niece saw the future or anything like that. She just could tell what other people were feeling. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Hell she even could make fire, and it was a good thing that Stan wasn’t able to do that at her age otherwise half of New Jersey would have been burnt to the ground in a month. Her life wouldn’t be as hard as Ma’s.

It broke the heart he pretended not to have to realize he wasn’t entirely correct.

There was the time when she was still learning how to take care of herself (he couldn’t bring himself yet to say “shield”; it was too much like one of Ford’s geek books for him) and he had brought her with him on an errand in Bend. Personally, Stan didn’t believe in banks, but Mabel insisted on having an account for the Library, and considering that his niece had a half share in the business he couldn’t refuse. They had taken two steps inside when Willow looked at one of the tellers, and let out a bloodcurdling shriek.

He looked down at her, about to shoosh Willow, but he saw that the blood had completely drained from her face and she was shaking from her curls to the tiny pink monkey sandals he had helped her put on that morning. Her eyes were locked on the teller closest to the wall, an innocuous looking balding man with a blonde walrus mustache. His dress shirt and suspenders stood out among the business casual everyone else wore and there was a dampness about him. Willow’s mouth still opened and closed, but no sound came out, as if she was too paralyzed with emotion to say anything.

Stan quickly knelt down next to his grandniece, noticing how the other patrons had begun to look at them. He made a note of all the exits and then asked “Kid, what’s your deal?”

“He…He…” Her voice was tight, and her breath was coming in shorter and shorter gasps.

“Calm down sweetie, um…” What was he supposed to say in this kind of situation again? “Just take some big breaths-“Willow tried her best but her little chest shuddered under the effort. Stan winced. “Okay, okay just, um wait and try to calm down.”

She looked at Stan and he could see the whites of her eyes. “He’s all black except there’s red on his hands and on his teeth like Uncle Dipper sometimes but this is different and he’s _bad_ and…and-“ She was shaking from head to toe, and her breath was hitching and Stan could tell Willow was only a minute or two away from an asthma attack. His back was going to be a bitch later tonight, but he lifted Willow up in his arms and carried her out to the car, where they drove home straight away.

 

He had a word with his oldest nephew that evening and for a few candy bars, Dipper went to check out the teller with the suspenders and the blonde moustache. He came home covered in gore and shaking with rage, before disappearing into the mindscape. The next morning the Gossiper was emblazoned with the story about a man found murdered in Bend. The walls were covered in arrows painted in the man’s blood that all converged on his closet, and the pictures and DVD’s that the police found there were…well, Toby was a sensitive soul and didn’t say what the police found but Stan could read between the lines.

She was so small, and she loved ponies and untying knots and bubbles. She rolled around on the floor with Hank and Acacia like a bunch of puppies, and told Mabel and Dipper about her imaginary friend Mx. Banana Phone the Third. She was six and she saw other people’s sins on them. She was eight and hid under the sink because the crush of other people’s emotions on her mind made her feel like “My me is going to go away.” She giggled at the most random things that came out of her parent’s mouths and helped in the Library from the minute she was old enough to hold a book. She was eleven and a fever hot hand grabbed his wrist and a voice far older than usual came out of her throat and said “Don’t get in the car Grunkle Stan,” and she couldn’t see the future and he probably would have been fine but Stanley Pines was no fool.

She was just like his Ma and it hurt, it fucking hurt to see Willow get ridden by her power rather than the other way around. It hurt to see his niece have the same bright glassy eyes that Ma would occasionally get. It hurt to see her fall into the same patterns that he had, that Dipper had, that Ma had. The tears, the wadded tissues left around the house, the locked door of her room-it all hurt.

What hurt the most to see Willow hurting like his Ma had. What hurt the most was that Stan had seen this all before, or something like it at least, and still had no fucking idea how to help.

\----------

“Stanley, get the garlic from the counter.”

“Yes Ma.” It was hard to reach, but with a phone book, Stan managed to nab the garlic that was next to the fruit basket to give to his mother. She took it and with a few whacks with her knife, the garlic was minced and put into the spaghetti sauce.

“Stanford, grab that container of oregano.”

That was actually in the cabinet, but the phone book, combined with a boost from Stan, helped Ford climb onto the counter and get into the cabinet. He threw the little plastic container at Ma, who deftly grabbed it out of the air, and dumped an inordinate amount of oregano into the gravy.

Stan helped Ford down from the counter and they were about to go to their bedroom to play before Ma finished dinner when she said conversationally, “Fear the beast with one eye.”

He felt his spine stiffen and the hair rise on his back, and he didn’t need to look at his brother to know that Ford was feeling the same thing. It was happening again.

“Ma?” Ford asked.

Her hands grabbed two pounds of spaghetti from the counter, opened the box and poured the noodles into the boiling water. “There will come a day when the two are sundered,” she said conversationally, as if she was discussing her stories with her friends on the phone or ordering meat from the butcher.

It felt like Stan was getting repeatedly punched in the stomach. Mom liked to fun around with them, lie and trick them, but something in his bones told him that this wasn’t one of those times.

Ma dipped a wooden spoon in the sauce and licked it to test the sauce, nodded once out of satisfaction. “One of you will be branded and one of you will be lost. Hate will hang thick and heavy on the air between you both.”

“Nuh…no way. We’re the Kings of New Jersey! We’re always going to be together!” Ford protested. Yet Stan noticed the way his brother’s shoulders shook.

Ma put the meatballs into the sauce and then turned to her sons. They recoiled at the blank look in her eyes, the flush of her cheeks, the way her hair coiled around her in a cloud.

“No. You won’t.”

Then it was like Ma wilted, and she went back to making dinner like the last few minutes hadn’t just happened. Stan looked at Ford and Ford looked at him and they silently agreed to retreat to their bedroom. Both of them managed to forget Ma’s words by the end of the week, and everything went back to normal.

Stan remembered those words that first night, sleeping on a hard futon in the shack his brother had cobbled together in the woods.

\----

“Why do they call you back?”

Ma looked up from the issue of Life she had been reading, her hair in curlers and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth.

“Whadya mean Stanley?”

“If you lie to people and they know it, why do they keep calling you back?” Stan knew he was a big dumbo compared to Ford, but the people who kept giving Ma a dollar a minute to tell them whatever crap popped out of her mouth had to be even stupider than he was.

“Come here kiddo and I’ll let you in on a secret.” Stan walked over to the nook that overlooked the street (though the view was blocked by the massive neon eye his Dad had installed last month) and scrambled up onto the seat next to his Ma.

Ma took a drink from the glass of Coke she had poured next to her, her lipstick leaning a mark on the cup. “You see Stan, people are like sheep.” Blood red nails flicked out as she counted off points. “They’re stupid, they’re led by the nose, and they want things to stay the same. They don’t really want to hear their futures; they just wanna hear some shit about how everything’s going to be okay. No, better than okay, excellent. They want lies to make them feel better about their own sad lives, not the truth.”

She took another long slurp from her drink. “And if they wanna pay me a dollar a minute to hear it, that’s just fine with me.”

Stan looked down at his hands, covered in cuts and scrapes. “Are…are me and Ford sheep too?”

“No way! Ford’s too smart and you’re too independent. No, you and Ford and Shermy and me… _We_ are goats.”

Ma had completely lost him. “Huh?”

“We’re goats! Stubborn, smart, think for ourselves, eat anything that is put in front of us; we’re not no fucking sheep Stan. We are goats and they’re all just rubes that are begging to be played like fiddles by people like us. Also, goats got those nifty eyes and shit.”

“Um…” Stan had never seen neither a goat or sheep in action except for one barely remembered kindergarten trip to a petting zoo so he decided to just go with what his Ma was saying. Though…

“What about Dad? Is Dad a goat?”

Ma’s face froze suddenly, her dark red lips pursing, eyes narrowed. She looked out the window.

“Ma?”

“Don’t you have something better to do now? Like bug your brother or something?”

Stan may have been dumb and only in second grade, but he knew when to take a hint. He hopped down and left the living room.

Behind him, his Ma kept on looking out the window, twisting the silver band around her finger.

\-------

Stan worried about Hank sometimes.

And by sometimes he really meant most of the time.

He wasn’t as worried about the girls. Acacia was…well, she was Acacia, and as such had a punch like a brick wall, his old knuckle dusters, no filter, and was practically fearless. Acacia didn’t get into trouble; she actively sought it out for fun. As for Willow, well. Even without being able to light things on fire, she could get in people’s minds with little to no trouble. And though he knew that it bothered her immensely, Stan also knew that when it came down to brass tacks, Willow wouldn’t hesitate to use any skill or ability that was at her disposal.

 

But Hank on the other hand. Stan didn’t want to say ‘soft’ because that was something that his dad would have said (did say frequently) and he had sworn the day they had found out Mabel was pregnant that he would never treat the kids the way his dad had treated him. Sweet. That was a good way to put it even though Stan would have never thought he’d use that word with a boy. Hank was sweet. Hank knew how people worked, what made them tick, more than anyone else Stan had ever known, except for his Ma. Hank knew (or at least, Stan thought he knew) how shitty people were yet he still…liked them?

Stan didn’t get it. He knew how people ticked, which made it easier to use and play them. People, on the whole, were awful. They were dumb, stupid, easily led, and really would only disappoint you in the end. Outside of everyone living in the Shack (and, okay, some others living in town too,) as far as Stan was concerned the whole world could burn and he wouldn’t care.  But Hank wasn’t like that. It was unnatural for a fourteen year old boy to be so… _nice._ What other people did, how they felt, who they knew; all of it interested Hank and he soaked it up like a sponge. Stan knew very well that Hank could defend himself-he and Mabel had been doing some stick training with him since he was a boy- but _would_ Hank actually protect himself?

His opinion changed when the triplets were sixteen, during the grand opening of the Gravity Falls Bicentennial Extravaganza at the town library.

Henry, as curator and with help from Pacifica and Dipper, had put together a historically accurate display of the _true_ history of Gravity Falls. Mabel, for her part, was cosplaying as Rainbow!Disco!Quentin Trembly, complete with 1820’s accurate top, bloomers that had a map of the state of Oregon sequined on the butt, and disco platform shoes with fish in the soles “to make me as tall as Ol’Q.” She even had the hat he had bestowed upon her years ago, and was currently pardoning every patron as they entered into the building.  Willow was womaning the dessert station, and using her fire to crust the tops of the crème brulees the caterer had brought in. Acacia was in the corner drawing caricatures of the guests (and charging twenty dollars a pop; he was so proud.) And since the library’s budget barely covered catering for this, Hank had been pressed into service as the waiter and busboy. His ankles and wrists poked out of the rented tux, despite the best efforts of his mother (and to Dipper’s despair.)

Stan for his part was content to sit in a chair in the corner and watch the circus. Time had both lessened the effects of the Society of the Blind Eye’s rays on the townsfolk and softened his opinion towards them as well. He had now spent more of his life here in Gravity Falls than he ever had in New Jersey or on the run, and the men, women, and otherwise milling about the room were his neighbors, had been for years.

He would have happily stayed in his corner all night (well _maybe_ he would have helped Acacia fleece some rubes in a bit) but then Preston Northwest entered the room, with a look on his face like he had smelt a dying skunk in a rotten egg factory.

Preston’s power within town had faded since the first summer the kids had spent with him, much of that thanks to Preston’s own daughter, Pacifica. But in the wider world outside of Gravity Falls, the name Northwest still held a lot of power.

And Preston and Priscilla had donated to their hometown’s small public library, had helped keep it afloat when the town’s budget wasn’t able to afford to buy hardback books or keep the mold out of the children’s section. The Northwest family had funneled money to the library because that was What One Did, but they would be expecting obedience from Henry in return.

Stan settled back down into his chair when he saw that Preston was making his way towards Henry. Henry had never been a pushover even before…before what had happened two years ago. Antlers appearing in his shadow and an overpowering presence would be the icing on the cake to the takedown he was about to see happen.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Hank look over to Preston. Hank looked at Preston, looked at his dad, still in conversation with Old Man McGucket, and to Preston again. His face set and to Stan’s surprise, he neatly intercepted himself into Preston’s path.

Stan started to get out of his seat when Dipper blipped into reality next to him, and gently pushed him back down into his chair. Stan scowled up at him. “Where the hell have you been?”

Dipper smiled, two rows of teeth showing.

“Around.”

Stan huffed, but knew it was no use pressing the demon any further. Instead he asked, “In case you haven’t noticed, Hank is on his way to an ass kicking and-“

“No he’s not. He’s got this.”

Preston started as he became aware of Hank standing in front of him. Dipper tapped Stan on the ears and suddenly he could hear every word coming out of Preston’s mouth as if he was standing next to the pair.

“-out of the way boy. I need to speak to your father.”

“I think you mean browbeat and harass my dad so I’m going to say no.”

Preston turned bright furious red, and then visibly took a deep breath, in a failed attempt to calm himself down.

“Mr. Northwest, you’re about four times my age, maybe five. Perhaps you should act it?”

Preston opened his mouth to retort back, but was interrupted by Mabel running by, screaming “FETCH THE PEANUT BRITTLE!” He looked at Hank and Stan itched to wipe the slimy smirk that appeared off of Preston’s dumb stupid face.

“Well. I shouldn’t be surprised, especially considering the way that chit ruined my daughter. Blood will tell in time I suppose.”

Hank cocked his head at Preston and simply stared at him for a minute, let Preston crane his neck to stare in turn because Hank had seven inches on the man. Moved the empty tray around in his hands, hands that were big enough to take up half the tray. Shifted his feet into a stance that Mabel and Stan had taught him.

“Does your wife know you’re sleeping with Veronica?”

Preston froze and Hank chuckled, far too worldly a sound to come out of the mouth of a teenage boy.

“Veronica who?”

“Her daughter Simone is in my computer class. I was worried about Simone because I happened to see her looking up abuse hotlines when we were working next to each other. So I brought her lunch that day and we started talking and it turns out her mom has bruises on her arms that she won’t tell Simone about.” He stared pointedly at Preston’s hands, his manicured nails and soft palms. “She said they looked an awful lot like hand marks to her.”

The breath had left Stan’s lungs at that point. He didn’t think Hank had that…that coldness in him (that Pines dark streak that he had, Mabel had, the girls had.)

Dipper’s hand tightened on his shoulder and when he looked up at his nephew there was an eager look in Dipper’s eyes. Like a predator readying to pounce on his prey.

“I…I can buy and sell you-“

“Nope, that’s kind of illegal. Fought a big war almost 200 years ago about that. We learned about that again last week in class.”

Preston was sweating now, showing weakness, but he pushed on. “How much is the land your house is on worth? Prime acreage, lots of lumber….it would be nothing for my lawyers to snatch that up. While I find Wal-Mart to be….rather gauche, I’m sure it would do nicely in that location.

Hank said nothing; an excellent move on his part, Stan thought. Preston was already close to breaking, though Stan thought he’d have to be the one to cut in and do that.

His youngest nephew leaned down slightly and whispered something into Preston’s ear. It took a minute, and when he stood up, there was…nothing on Hank’s face. Maybe a slight hint of satisfaction at a job well done but other than that, nothing.

Preston on the other hand looked like a puppet whose strings had been cut. The proud regal bearing of his body was completely gone, and he looked like he was about to slump to the floor. The blood had drained from his face and sweat stained the pits of his suit. His eyes were dull, lifeless.  He looked like a broken man and for a dark second, Stan wondered if he would see Preston’s face on the front page tomorrow.

The older man turned and slunk out of the library. He didn’t run from Hank, but he did walk suspiciously fast. Hank stood still, making sure that Preston left the Library, before closing his eyes and taking a few deep shuddering breaths. Then he opened his eyes again, adjusted his glasses on his face, and plastered a smile back on, turning to the guests and once again playing the good son and for this night, waiter.

“Told you Hank could take care of himself,” Dipper said smugly to Stan but Stan wasn’t entirely listening.

Mostly he was thinking about how proud his Ma would be of Hank.

And how proud he was, though that pride was tempered by the fact that Hank just destroyed a man with his words alone.

Anyone else Stan would keep an eye on them.

Hank was a good boy though. He’d be fine.

\----

“I hate to break it to ya, but your life’s kinda gonna suck.”

Stan scowled behind the wheel.

“Jeez, thanks Ma,” he muttered as he took the car through the intersection and then winced as Ma poked him hard in the arm with the sharp end of her nail file.

“Stanley! Don’t blow through the fucking stop signs!”

He sighed and for the tenth time that day reconsidered the whole ‘learning to drive’ thing. His Dad had been the first one to give him and Ford driving lessons but after two trips out in the car, he had turned the twins over to Ma. If Stan didn’t know any better, he would have said that Dad was actually scared to be in the car with him. But that was ridiculous because if there was one thing Dad wasn’t, it was a big chicken. What that  _did_ mean for him and Ford was that Ma constantly shouted and prodded them with her nail file as she sat next to them in the passenger’s seat.

Personally, he thought Ford’s habit of doing only forty on the highway was way worse than him accidentally not seeing a stop every once in a while and-

Another sharp jab in the arm. “You almost got my side of the car hit! That was a red light Stan! Sweet Moses kid!”

“Sorry Ma.”

His Ma sniffed. “That’s right. Turn left and keep going until I tell you turn again.” She went back to filing her fingernails, and he relaxed a little in the driver’s seat, getting back in the groove of driving once again.

“But yeah,” Ma said out of the corner of her mouth after they had gone a few blocks. “There’s going to be a good…oooh, I dunno twenty or thirty, maybe even forty years where your life is just going to be the  _worst_.”

Stan rolled the car to a stop at the light and looked at his Ma briefly. Her eyes were fixed on the road ahead, and her hands were frozen in place, the nail file resting on her left ring finger. Dust from her nails was spread across her lap and Stan felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

God _damnit._

The light turned green and Ma kept on talking. “Everything and everyone you know will be ripped from you.” She paused. “Or pissed away through poor life choices; sorry kid. That’s your dad’s side of the family there.”

Ford and Stan long ago realized that when Ma was having one of her funny spells that it was best to just let her ride it out, and not interrupt until she was finished saying whatever random or creepy thing was coming out of her mouth.

But his right arm was aching from a dozen pokes of that stupid nail file, and Ford had been spending every night this week working on his weird dork project for the science fair (and it only took Stan thirty minutes to make Footbot!) and it felt like Ford was slipping away, like he was losing his brother to something but Stan didn’t know what.

“Thanks Ma. Nice to know I got a life of misery ahead of me and then I pop it. Just great.” He gunned the engine, speeding through the yellow. “Anything else you’re dying to tell me while you’re at it?”

“You’re going to save the world Stanley.”

“Har har har, thanks a fucking lot for rubbing it in. That’s Ford’s job.”

The nail file darted out and struck, poking Stan’s arm harder than she ever had done before. Luckily he had seen the stop sign this time and had stopped the car for a second, otherwise he would have swerved out of the lane.  

“ _Listen to me,”_ Ma hissed, and he had never heard that voice come from his Ma before, never heard her this cold and hard. She’d gone weird before, but never this bad.

“Ford will throw away everything, give up everyone precious to him for ashes and dust. Don’t you mind him. You on the other hand-“

She pulled the nail file out of his arm, and Stan could feel a drop of blood ooze from where she poked him and trail down his arm.

“One day you will hold two pearls in your hands. One will be one you have fought for for many years, given up everything to obtain. The other will have fallen into your life by chance and lies. One is poison, the other is hope. Choose wrongly and the world burns. Choose correctly and you gain more than you could have ever hoped for.”

 

Ma fell silent and it was only then that Stan noticed that sweat had broken out all over his body, that his heart was beating fast, and that there were fifteen cars honking behind him because the light was green. Stan slammed on the gas, and the car jerked and then sailed through the intersection. A slight grating sound told Stan that his mother had gone back to filing her nails, like nothing had happened.

“When…when you say the world burns-?” he began to ask. Sometimes Ma remembered what she had said and other times not.

This was going to be one of those not times because Ma responded with “What? Are you reading Ford’s old issues of Asimov now?” Stan sighed. “Forget it Ma.” The last thing either of them needed was for him to crash the car not two blocks from home.

The next day he and his brother got called to the office at school and any weird thing his Ma said left his mind soon after.

\---

“Can…” Mabel’s voice on the phone was subdued, sad, _wrong._

“Can we come and stay? With you?”

Stan put down the waffle batter he was making, to get a better hold of the old cord phone that lived on the wall in the kitchen. “Sure sweetie, any time.”

“Can we come and stay…for…for good?”

His throat suddenly felt clogged up and his eyes must have gotten dirt or hair in them or something, but he still managed to choke out, “Yeah, you and Dip can stay.”

Mabel started to cry and his chest tightened as he heard Anna in the background gently ask for the phone, heard Anna start to talk about technicalities and paperwork.

And his Ma’s voice in his head, pleased in a way he rarely heard, saying “Right pearl kiddo.”

 

 

                    


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Guess I wasn't done with Sheila after all. From a tumblr prompt "WE NEED MORE ACTUAL PSYCHIC MA PINES. PRONTO."

Sheila clicked the TV on, then went and eased into her recliner, feet covered with slippers and her favorite purple nightgown on. One hand reached back to pull her hair out of its bun while the other grabbed the glass of gin from the side table. Filbrick was out bowling with his league tonight and the boys were in bed. Well, supposed to be in bed, but she could hear the telltale creaking of their third hand bunk bed and she knew they were probably still up, playing with cars together under one of their blankets. She’d give them another ten or fifteen minutes before she got up and yelled at them to go to bed. She remembered being that age once and-

It felt like she was going numb starting from her toes and crawling its way up her body. Her bones ached, and her limbs felt heavy, unmovable. Her skin broke out in goosebumps and her stomach hurt.

Sheila sighed. Not this shit again.

Well. May as well get this over with. She drained her glass of gin, then let her eyelids fall shut as she felt what her own Ma called her Other Eyes open.

Her Eyes opened and she wasn’t in her living room any more.

She was in Stanley’s.

Well, at least she was pretty sure it was Stan’s living room-that was his old grizzled butt she Saw sitting on the recliner, watching TV. But the big dinosaur skull that seemed to serve as an end table, the fish tank with some weird lizard creature in it, the mish mash taxidermied animals on the walls and the various swords and axes that hung with them; that was all Ford’s taste right there.

Before she could wander any further down that train of thought, the quiet of the scene was interrupted by one of the doors slamming open and three redheaded kids running in and jumping onto Stan. The stockier of the two girls who came in climbed up and perched herself on the back of the chair, dangling her legs over Stan’s shoulder. The boy, all knees and elbows like his sisters, plopped down on the floor in between Stan’s legs. The smallest of the three climbed over one of the armrests and sat down in Stan’s lap.

“Jeez kids, I’m not your damn jungle gym,” her son griped in a rough rasp that she was beginning to hear the occasional hint of in his voice. But, Sheila noticed, he made no move to shoo them off.

 _Grandchildren_  her Eyes informed her, not by his  _Blood_  but in  _Heart_  and  _Soul_. (Her Other Eyes had a tendency to talk really sappy. And in italics and capital letters. It was really fucking annoying.)

Despite griping and pleading to change the channel (and they didn’t even need to get up and click it over any more?) the kids- _triplets_   _Hand Voice Sight stars-_ soon settled down to watch whatever Stanley had been watching before they interrupted him.

Well. All of them except for the small girl  _Antares_  on his lap  _fighter_  who instead of looking at the TV was looking at-

Somewhere far away, on the other side of the country, years in the past, Sheila felt the breath leave her body. The girl in Stan’s lap was looking directly at her, eyes the same shade of brown that she saw in the mirror every morning.

 _She Sees_.

Her Other Eyes had passed down and Sheila felt like she was going to throw up. She had been so relieved that her daughter Shermy didn’t See, that the boys  _definitely_  didn’t See, but here was her grandchild looking at her curiously, unafraid. Sheila wouldn’t wish this burden on anyone, had hoped that it would die out with her and it  _hadn’t_ and-

“Don’t be sad.”

Stan frowned down at the girl in his lap. “What are you talking about Will? We’re all fine.”

The girl  _Willow_  pointed at the corner of the room. “There’s a lady with long brown hair and a purple nightgown with a goat on it and she looks sad and she shouldn’t be because-“

Her youngest granddaughter got a slightly glazed look in her eyes, a glaze Sheila recognized from her own mother (that she must have right now back in her chair.) “-because I’m fine and we’re fine.”

Stan stiffened, though her siblings ignored her with the ease of long practice. Finally in a strangled voice, Stan asked “Does…is she wearing big gol-“

“MA!”

Sheila shot up in her chair, gasping for breath like she had been running a race, hair sticking to her damp forehead.

“Ma?” It was Ford, in his rocket ship pajamas.

“What is it kid?” she managed to say in a tone of voice somewhat approaching normal. So real, it had been so real, and someone  _Saw_  her.

“A bat got into the room again, and we can’t get it out and I think Stan got bit and-“

Sheila let her son’s words wash over her, as she got up and went to deal with the latest fiasco her boys had gotten into.


End file.
